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I'm about ready to make some big purchases and I want paint my soon to be bigger Marine Army white. I was wondering the best method. Games Workshop has a painting "guide" on the method but I was thinking you painted an off white as a base, highlighted with pure white and washed with either devlan mud or a black wash. What's the best method of painting white?

Ceramite white. Thin it down and do 2 coats. Best white mini's paint on the market.

IIRC you can get white primers (GW & Army Painter) that should make the hard work easy.

Rule # 1, always paint dark colors over the light ones. Never try to paint white over a dark color.

If you do have paint white over dark put down a layer of gray first.

You're right in that it's better to get an off white then highlight with a pure. There's really a couple of ways to do it, the easiest being starting with a white primer then using washes. But I think starting from a black or grey primer is a bit better, you then have three "tones" for the white. Building up through blues or using a blue wash will give a cold looking white, brown will give a warm looking white and black will give a ceramic white.

The most important thing though is to use thin coats as white itself doesn't tend to cover well so you'll have to use several anyway.

Thank you all very much! Those Marines should be nice and white when I paint 'em up. Seems that paint list for painting white on the GW site is kosher.

white primer will help a lot, but it does require you to pay more attention when painting...

just use thin layers and a lot of patience and you will get a smooth result

I recommend priming with white and painting straight from the pot with several layers of thinned white afterwards for consistency.

Lt.Soundwave wrote:I recommend priming with white and painting straight from the pot with several layers of thinned white afterwards for consistency.

no one should paint from the pot. ever.

airbrush if its doable perfect whites everytime. if you cant airbrush the area then i usually start with grey and then beige over that then add white to the beige and layer it on then more white to the beige and so on until its as white as i want it or solid white either way

no one should paint from the pot. ever.

Maybe, however ever since I started posting here the majority of compliments and questions I have gotten have been about how I get the finished result of the white paintjob i used on my Tau. Many people here seem to have issues painting with white complaining of a largely "patchy" nature. The way I go about it has no such issues. I am certainly not billing the method as suitable for all situations but perhaps in this case it isnt as bad as you might believe.

White in general is 100% the hardest color to paint for our hobby, yellow being a close second.

For most things I need white these days I used to only airbrush it, even if it's a very small area. Ceramite white has changed that with it's pigment density, but it remains chalky off the shelf.

I also don't use GW pots, even for GW paints. I transfer all paints to dropper bottles for several reasons. First to increase shelf life, GW pots are known for drying out, even the new style. Secondly to make measuring out mixes very easy as a drop is the same amount for all my bottles. They also take up less floor space than pots, so I can fit more in a smaller space.

Since all my paints are in dropper bottles, my only option is to paint from a palette(I use a wet palette to further extend working time of paint that has been poured).

I used to have a 5 step procedure with GW's foundation paints.

White primer (NOT GW's spray paint, A proper primer).
Touch up with a higher pigment content white (used to be foundation range).
Wash with blue or black.
Touch up with foundation layer.
Highlight with thinner white paint.

I don't know how I'd do it with the current paints, as I've not tried them.

Aerethan wrote:no one should paint from the pot. ever.

QFT!

Always use a palette when painting, as it makes mixing and thinning a breeze.

All my DE and SoB are white + purple, all of my IG are yellow so I sadly picked pain in the a@% colourschemes.
Anyway for my white I do this [note this is for my leaders so if your doing troops you can skip a phase or two for speed but it will compromise the whites purity, it becomes streaky]

Black undercoat

Spacewolves grey + black undercoat (should look like a grey similar to dakkas background)

Spacewolves grey

Spacewolves grey + white (with this you should leave the previous layer in the cracks)

Spacewolves grey + white x2 (with this you should leave more of the previous layer in the cracks)

White

Do all of these mixes on a pallette and add exactly one brush worth of water for each brush worth of paint.
So the grey + black you add two water dabs from the brush. However only add one bit of water for the double-white phase.

Finally paint white straight from the pot for highlights (such as tips of cloaks, ridges of armour).
Additionally add a brown/purple/grey/blue ink depending on your scheme into the very edges of the model.
If you have a lot to make than production line it in phases (paint them all the grey colour, than the SW grey .etc)

The recipe in the last White Dwarf looks pretty good until you try to work with Ulthuan Grey and find it can't wait to split up and go all blobby unless you thin it to the point that you're just washing the fig.

No way I'll put UG through my airbrush!

Let me start off with saying that painting white is easy. Painting any colour is easy. But white (and other light colours) are time consuming.

There's two problems with white.

Firstly, how do you highlight a colour that is already as light as it can be?

Secondly, how do you get a nice even coat of a colour when it's so easy to see the base coat through it?

To highlight a colour, the area that is highlighted must be lighter than the areas that aren't. This seems like basic common sense, but it's easy to forget when painting light colours. What you generally want to do is have three "areas" of colour. The shades, the middle, and the highlight. So you need to choose what colour you want for your white. Will it be a blue-white, a grey-white, a brown-white? Then take a slightly off-white colour of your choice and apply as your base coat.

Then add a little darker colour to your mix, and shade the recesses, then add a little more white and start the highlights. Easy in theory, but you need to be very careful with your blending!

To get a nice even coat of any colour is simple. Multiple thinned layers of paint. Some colours will require less layers, but white requires the most. I recommend using a dark undercoat. This will let you see exactly where you have covered, and where you have not. There's no shortcuts here, not if you want a good result. Just multiple layers.

We have different definitions of "easy".

An easy paint is one that covers in a single coat, maybe two.

With the exception of ceramite white(which can still take 3 coats), all white paint I've come across for this hobby takes a billion coats to become as opaque as something like Enchanted Blue which is one of the best covering paints.

Aerethan wrote:Ceramite white. Thin it down and do 2 coats. Best white mini's paint on the market.

Aerethan wrote:no one should paint from the pot. ever.

Aerethan wrote:With the exception of ceramite white(which can still take 3 coats), all white paint I've come across for this hobby takes a billion coats to become as opaque as something like Enchanted Blue which is one of the best covering paints.

This guy knows his sh*t.

Ceramite white has a high pigment count and at present is the best acrylic white I have ever seen. It's good stuff

Aerethan wrote:Ceramite white. Thin it down and do 2 coats. Best white mini's paint on the market.

If I were to do it this way, how would I highlight it? Or does it only need a wash?

Technically, Ceramite white is slightly grey compared to Skull white, so you could highlight with that, though I doubt it would be noticeable.

Generally though you would wash it for shading.

Here is a great blog post my buddy wrote on painting white, model turned out great and only took him an hour or so.

http://lastsquare.com/squareblog/blog/2012/06/21/painting-perils-white/#comment-33

While the end result is good, 1 hour to get the base color of a single marine down is a long time.

Then again perhaps I'm answering the wrong question for the thread. I'm saying what the EASIEST way is, and the OP is asking for the BEST way, which aren't necessarily the same thing.

I'll keep that in mind. I'll try the highlights and have it plain and post the results.

Edit: I should've specified, I wanted the best way to paint white. But I appreciate the easy methods given. Makes painting those tactical squads less time taking.

Cool man, good luck with it hope to see pics soon.